John D. Podesta

John D. Podesta (aka John David Podesta, J.D.) became an advisor to President Barack Obama in December, 2013. He is founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, served as Chief of Staff to President William Jefferson Clinton and headed the transition team for President-elect Barack Obama. Podesta is Visiting Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. He is a government relations and public affairs consultant. [1]

John Podesta "is considered one of the Democratic party's sharpest and toughest operatives. Podesta is a 54-year-old marathon runner with an intense, angular face that seems to suggest he is always calculating something you would never be able to grasp. He is also the leader and architect of a new liberal think tank in Washington known as the Center for American Progress. His goal is to build an organization to rethink the very idea of liberalism, a reproduction in mirror image of the conservative think tanks that have dominated the country's political dialogue for a generation."[2]

Tobacco industry documents

During press interviews in January, 2000, then-White House Chief of Staff John Podesta said that the Administration's top priority for the coming year was to enact a prescription drug benefit and inferred that tobacco taxes would be a key revenue offset.[6]